Nightmares
by Jest'lyn Tal
Summary: Our heroes can battle Geth, conquer Collectors and defy secret organizations run by men with weird blue eyes. However, all of them must occasionally have their nightmares... Note: Nightmares are violent - hence the rating
1. Chapter 1

Standard Disclaimers: I do not own BioWare nor Mass Effect.  
Story Disclaimers: While "Nightmares" does fit into the universe as my other stories, you don't need to read any of the others to follow it. "Nightmares" is planned to be a chapter for each character - we'll see how it goes!

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"Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares." Mahatma Gandhi

**Commander Shepard**

Commander Shepard, Spectre and Captain of the Normandy, was thirty-two years old. In those thirty-two years she'd seen more horror than most people twice her age. Granted, some of those things hadn't been witnessed directly but the fact that they were only the last echoing warnings of an extinct race didn't lessen their impact as they rattled about in her head. That most of those horrors were things she'd battled past or conquered in the end didn't make them any less awful to begin with.

Given this, any normal person might assume that her dreams would be tormented. That twisting to escape phantoms before waking in a cold sweat only to fear what might await her should she go back to sleep, would be a frequent if not private torment for the woman to face.

Quite the contrary, though, Shepard usually slept like a baby.

As a matter of fact, she usually slept like a milk-drunk and occasionally lightly snoring baby who seldom remembered her dreams anyway.

There were those other rare times though. Shepard had, once or twice, twisted helplessly in her dreaming, awoken with hand out-flung in an instinctive search for the pistol she kept on her nightstand, and found exceptionally plausible excuses for doing things that kept her from returning to sleep.

She was human, after all. She did have nightmares sometimes.

Her nightmares were simply patient.

Mindoir, for example, knew to wait for her dreamscapes to be serene or for her to be contented in them. Happy. Then and only then did it seep up like putrid groundwater to taint every last peaceful thread.

Just like the time she dreamed she was back at the academy, walking from her dorm room to the mess hall. It was no day in particular but she was pleased with herself and her accomplishments. As she strode, she approached the small grotto where cadets sometimes sat to talk between classes.

Only suddenly, subtly, it wasn't the grotto anymore.

It was a field of grain bowing under a green scented breeze. The stalks were tall but she could see the off-white walls of her home in the distance. The yellow pennant that her father had run up an overly high flag pole, a guidepost for a young Shepard, waved unchallenged in the sky.

Shepard smiled as she saw it. She wasn't so short anymore that she needed the help in finding her way home through the tall fields, but even now when she looked at it she felt safe.

That's when the Batarian ship blotted out the sun and she started to hear people screaming.

Or just last like last month…

Shepard was walking down some nameless street, basking in sunlight. This time it isn't a cadet's triumphs making her happy but rather the click of her heels on concrete. She's indulging herself today, reveling in her civvies. One of the stores she passes has a display of manikins wearing bright things, pretty things that she won't be able to tell the details of once she's awake but that in her dream she knows she wants.

When she turns to look closer, however, the manikins wear the faces of her parents, of her boyfriend at school and her friends.

Those pretty things stain when the manikins begin to bleed. When they burn, the fabric falls away completely.

Then there are the Battle nightmares. It isn't surprising that they do not wait for any particular setting or mood before they descend. They always storm right in and drop her into a situation or fight.

There will be no transition at all before she'll be rounding the rock outcropping on Eden Prime, Kaidan at her left and Jenkins at her right. Grass snaps, oddly loud, under her feet as they advance. Then it's the sound of weapons fire and geth with four eyes are shooting at them. In her dreams, Jenkins dies screaming, begging her for help. For some reason she can't move, can't act, and the world warps on his death rattle. When she looks up it is to see Kaidan shambling towards her with the blue-hued skin and gaping mouth of a husk.

That's a favorite tactic of the Battles too. Since they knew no subtlety, they frequently threw in multiple disturbing themes. The more the merrier. On one notable occasion, Miranda was vivisecting Shepard, glittering scalpel precise as it flayed skin. Though bound, Shepard could still see Ashley, missing her legs and trailing her guts, slowly dragging herself across the deck plates to an oblivious Thane. The crunch as blunt human teeth tore into a drell throat was a sharp contrast to the scratching sounds that Wrex was making, grinding his fingers down past bone, as he tore at the walls.

Neither of those types of nightmares, however, ever managed to keep the impact of their dream events once she'd woken up. Sure, they remained upsetting, but once awake she could remind herself that in the end they were just dreams. Phantom regrets and fears.

She couldn't do that when she dreamed of Dying.

Death neither subverted existing scenes nor blurred the lines of realism. Those nightmares were always the same and always as vivid as the moments had actually been when they happened.

She sees Joker in the shuttle and the incandescent line of light that separates them, keeps her from the shuttle and promised safety. She debates but not for long. She knows what she has to do and she doesn't hesitate to smack the controls. She has to get her pilot out while he still has a chance.

Then it's a flare, white and sharp. Her vision is overwhelmed by it even as her body is overwhelmed with pain as she's flung into the wall. Bones snap and she tumbles. The universe is on fire and she's thrown away from her disintegrating ship.

Her Normandy.

Disorientation. Adrenaline is, at least for now, stronger than the pain. Her mind casts about, trying to find a solution, debating action. What to do next and how to do it. The sound of her breath, so horribly loud in the absence of all other sounds, is both comforting and somewhat unnerving.

But it's good. It means she's alive. She's alone but she's alive.

The sound of air venting into space promises to change that.

The realization of the ruptured line is a cold shock that focuses her instantly one thing – survival. She tries frantically to reach behind her, to get to the air line. She's not even sure why except that there's the barest hope she can place her hand over the leak and that's better than nothing. Stem it. Keep the air coming. She can't reach it though and her chest begins to feel like its being pressed in a vise. She claws futilely, writhing.

No. No. No.

And "Come on, just a little further, damn it!" becomes "Oh, God, someone help me!"

She can't feel her hands anymore, or her legs.

And there is no thinking. No planning. No begging or even swearing anymore.

There is just panic and terror as her vision begins to pixilate, black specks flaring to steal the universe away from her.

In reality, she hadn't given up. She'd struggled to the last against both death and her own fear.

In her nightmares, however, those things have complete control. Here they are much stronger she can't fight them.

Which is why, when she wakes, she chokes, sobbing for air. She curls up on her side, irrationally afraid that somehow, because it is dark, that means she's still out there.

Shepard rarely has nightmares.

Then again, all of her worst ones don't wait for her to be asleep to walk with her.

_Square your shoulders._

_Do your duty._

_See it through. _

_But above all…_

_Keep breathing._


	2. Chapter 2

Standard Disclaimers: I don't own Mass Effect or Jack

This is the second installment in a potential series discussing the nightmares of our ME2 crew.

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Someone once asked Jack what sort of nightmares she had. Some shithead, some bar. Some sort of fucking stare down trying to prove who had bigger stones before they went out and robbed, pillaged and plundered.

His name was Robbie.

Robert.

Bert.

Something like that.

She'd lied of course. Told him some bad ass story about how her only nightmares involved the dark things, the things that crawl under your skin and stalk you in the night, finally coming to rip her to shreds for all the shit she'd done. Then she'd grinned at him and drawn her blade. The big shiny one with the serrated edge that got taken from her when she'd finally gotten locked up. She'd made a point of looking at it and saying that it was because of dreams like that she gave no mercy to anyone. Ever.

Because they were all just shredded dog-meat walking, anyway.

It'd sounded good, anyway.

Thing was, her nightmares were never that dramatic. Sure, there was the occasional one about fighting off an endless hoard of children that laughed and teased her. But, that one just left her feeling empty inside, really. She'd spend an eternity in dream time slaughtering them before they ever really touched her, and just wake up feeling old.

It was the one with the cliff and the ocean though. The one she could never tell anyone about because it was so lame when it was put into words that really sealed the deal.

She'd be standing on a cliff. Gravel at her feet and only small scrub brush around her. The sky was always smudged with those almost-clouds. The type that just obscured the blue, but never got up the guts to really form any type of shape. Her view was absolutely unimpeded. She saw every inch of the sky and every gallon of the dark blue ocean stretching out to the horizon line. Every bit of it, and every bit of it was vast, huge, and cold.

So big. So wide. So open. And then it'd start fucking with her. It was like it was all getting heavy around her. Pressing in. Making her feel as if she was getting crushed amid all of it even as a wave of vertigo twisted her stomach and drew it all up and away from her.

Because she was falling. Somehow, she'd gotten too close to the cliff's edge. She was falling and the world rushed by her, twisting and churning. She didn't think to user her biotics to slow her descent or do some other shit. She had no awareness of her biotics. No awareness of anything but the fact that she was falling, she was shrinking, she was being swirled and whirled down some existential drain.

And sooner or later, she was going to hit the water. And she'd freeze to death. She'd sink to the bottom of the ocean and cease to be as the waves crystallized over her, hiding her behind glass where no one could ever see, and made everything silent.

Silent and lost.

Always falling.

No.

Better to make up something then ever to have to admit to having dreams like that.


End file.
